“Frieda Mumm’s: Discovering Home” opens at Museum of the Grand Prairie Saturday

BY DANI TIETZ
dani@mahometnews.com

In every story told, there is more than meets the eye.

The stories told and those that will be created at the Museum of the Grand Prairie’s upcoming exhibit: “Frieda Mumm’s Discovering Home” are no different.

It’s not something museum curators will be there to talk about, though. 

After years of creating the interactive experience, the Museum of the Grand Prairie will gladly allow the visitors’ imagination to take over while they experience what it’s like to be home, travel home and correspond with home during another time.

Every detail of the exhibit has a story of its own; it’s something that was intentional as museum curators set out to renovate the popular lower level.

Adults who once visited the area formerly known as the Children’s Discovery Area, may remember a time when they dressed up, pretending they were a settler on the prairie as their children created their own stories by climbing into a thatched wigwam, imagining what it would be like to stay warm during the harsh winters.

“This space had been around for a long time,” Museum Curator Mark Hanson said.

“We recycled a lot of the basic concepts that were down here before. When (people) come back, it will be new and fresh for the kids, but there will still be those touchstones.”

The renovated space, based on the concept of settler and Native American homes, will help children imagine and re-imagine home, both then and now.

“Kids are dealing with a lot of things, and I think home is an important thing to think about: what it used to be, how home has always been the same,” Hanson said.

Champaign County Forest Preserve Public Program and Visitor Services Coordinator Pat Cain said, “there are differences across history, but there are a lot of fundamental similarities with the homes that we see in this space as well as the homes that we have.

“We all have the same basic needs still that we’ve had since the dawn of human history: water, shelter, fire. The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

“I think it’s a timely and important topic to be thinking about, but I also think it’s a topic that I think kids can get their head wrapped around,” Hanson said. “It’s not something that’s overly complicated or academic; it’s something that everybody experiences in different ways and it impacts their lives.”

A table will be set near the hearth so that families can play games or talk or children can go pick “corn” from the stalks located in the corner of each area.

The exhibit also includes information about how people traveled home or corresponded with home.

A staple in the lower level of the museum was a horse made of barrels. The horse is still there, just in a different form, standing near a dugout canoe that children can sit in as they pretend to voyage down the Sangamon River.

Children can also pretend to call home on a rotary phone or sort postcards in the mail sorting area.

This is where the intricate details of an interactive exhibit really come to life.

Each postcard is durable enough to last for years even as children place them in boxes or read a message from Abraham Lincoln. The names, addresses and messages will transport children back to some important historical figures while even the youngest children can participate by just sorting mail by colors. 
These are the stories guests to museums never think about; but these are the details that museum curators spend hours visualizing so that their guests can take part in stories that live on for generations.

One of the names on the postcards is the exhibit’s namesake, Frieda Mumm: a woman who spent years volunteering within the museum’s walls just so guests could take away a seed of knowledge: connecting them to the world around them, the world before them and the possibilities of a world that could be.

When Mumm passed away in 2014 at the age of 104, she left a $130,000 gift to the Museum of the Grand Prairie from her estate.

Mumm spent much of her time at the museum participating in the Prairie Beaker program, which allowed visitors to immerse themselves in the day-to-day life of early central Illinois settlers. She demonstrated how to churn butter and make lye soap and candles, and served as one of the program’s first schoolmarms.

Hanson said “Discovering Home” is a great way to carry on Mumm’s work.

“It’s about kids, education, those things that she really felt passionate about; this was a perfect fit to honor her legacy here and continue those things that she felt were important,” he said.

The Champaign County Forest Preserve invites community members to celebrate the opening of the new exhibit on Saturday, May 18 from 1 to 4 p.m.

Alongside the open exhibit, children can partake in household activities with a historical twist, listen to tales of home from a professional storyteller, see and touch a real live horse and buggy from Merrybeth Farm Carriage Service or learn how to write their name in Morse Code.

This event is free and open to the public.